neighborhoods

Ninety days outside the Schengen area – the medina, Fès

Eve Neuhaus 10 Comments

For several days, Tom and I stayed in the Bird’s Nest, an upper room in Palais el Mokri, which is truly a palace, on a hilltop above the medina in Fès.

The view from our “dining room”

It was a little like staying at Miss Haversham’s place. Built in 1906 for the Pasha of Casablanca, his descendants are now restoring their magnificent inheritance, an enormous project, and renting out rooms on Airbnb. They’ll also cook for you, and bring very decent meals to your rooms.

The place is magnificent. Dilapidated, but magnificent – and worth every penny of the $23/night we spent to stay there!

Our dining room
The windows in our bedroom
Coming up the stairs into the Bird’s Nest
Doors in the Bird’s Nest
Looking out over Fès from our room. See the grass on the roof tiles?

Palais el Mokri is about a ten minute walk from the souks, museums, and restaurants of the medina, or old city, of Fès.

Here’s a peek into what we saw there:

The kitchen at Glaoui Palace
Artist at work
Pieces for sale
The souk in the medina
Snails for sale. Lots of them.
A man who was sitting on the ground shelling peas
A woman begging
Vegetables for sale
Dye pots
Newly dyed clothing
Street musicians
Supplies for making slippers
Cats are everywhere
Carrying a pile of empty sacks
Donkeys are common

Living in Cordes – Mocha

Eve Neuhaus 11 Comments

The evening Tom and I returned from Le Havre with our rented van full of the boxes we’d shipped from Los Angeles, our neighbors Ann and Leif greeted us in front of our house with sad news. Andreas, the other newcomer to our neighborhood, a Swiss artist who’d also moved to Cordes from California, had died suddenly.

His dog Mocha was staying with another neighbor, Dominique, who couldn’t keep her until Andreas’s relatives came, which could be several weeks. Not only did Pompom the cat object, but Mocha’s barking was bothering Dominique’s guests.

When we saw that the address on Mocha’s address was Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA, the solution was obvious. Mocha would come to stay with us until Andreas’s family decided where she would go.

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The next day, after we returned the van to Albi where we’d rented it, we picked Mocha up at Dominique’s house. Mocha was not happy. She didn’t want to stay with us. It was clear that she loved Andreas very much and was grieving deeply.

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So, when Tom opened the door take some empty boxes to the recycling, she was out like a flash.

Naturally, she headed back straight to Andreas’s place. Tom and I managed to corner her briefly, but when a car went by and we had to alter our very strategically chosen positions, she took off again, this time down the street toward the bistro where Andreas, like most Cordais, liked to sit.

We had pictures on my phone, and people knew Mocha, but no one had seen her. She was spotted near Andreas’s place several times. We left a note with Tom’s French phone number on his door; people called, but no one could catch her. Pretty soon half the village was involved.

At 10:30 that night we heard voices in front of our house and looked out the window to see Leif, who told us that Dominique found Mocha sleeping on Andreas’s step, scooped her up, and now had her in her car. She’d be right over.

So Mocha came home. She had chopped sausage and a little duck for dinner. And she went to sleep on our bed.

Day by day she is becoming more accustomed to her new home. She no longer pulls on the leash when we go near Andreas’s house. She enjoys hanging out at the bistro, where she’s very popular.

And she loves being groomed! (Not so much the bath.)

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But a long walk, table food, and sleeping on a good bed suits her very well!

Now we’ve heard from the family that we can keep her!

Thank you, Andreas, for this wonderful new family member.

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Living in Cordes – Beauty all around

Eve Neuhaus 12 Comments

Perhaps August is the most beautiful month of the year in this medieval village in southwest France, or maybe it only seems so because it’s the beginning of our new life here and we’re seeing everything with fresh eyes.

Either way, here’s a series of pictures from our first two weeks. A few, like the one above, were taken from our bedroom window first thing in the morning; the view is enchanting.

After dinner we usually climb the hill behind our house. This picture was taken about half way to the top.Our neighbor, Lilliane, who comes from Paris every summer, tells us the best restaurant in the village is at the Hostellerie du Vieux Cordes. Rochelle, Tom, and I sat on the patio there, shaded by a 300 year old wisteria, until a thunderstorm chased us inside. Even inside it was dramatic. As I took the last bite of my oeufs brouillé au truffes (the English menu called them “blurred eggs with truffles”) one of the tall casement windows blew open with a bang, startling everyone in the room.

Later we sheltered under the roof of Les Halles, the covered square at the top of the village, and watched as lightning lit up the sky above the museum of contemporary art, once one of the grand houses of the village.When taking the footpath from our house to the lower village, bring a bucket for all the wild fruit: blackberries, plums, quince, apples and grapes.

I think my favorite meal is soup, salad, and bread, with a Gaillac rosé.

One day we were greeted by traditional Occitan music and dancing when we got off the bus from Albi.

Another view from the window:

A doorway on our street:

After Rochelle left, Garrett, Chris, and Ed visited. Garrett cooked us a spectacular Sichuan Chinese meal.

A walk in the upper village:

And a visit to the Musèe Charles Portal, the history and archeology museum, which rises high above the western gate to the city, the Charles Portal.

Lace-making machinery from the early 20th century:

And more morning pictures:

Including some hot air balloons which floated gently over the village at daybreak.

Really, what more could anyone ask?

Letting go

Eve Neuhaus 10 Comments

Our beautiful house is on the market at last. It took me well over a year to sort and organize before releasing it into the world to be enjoyed by new occupants. Almost eighteen years in a place is a long time.

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At first the house was filled with our growing family: three of our five kids, my mother, and, for a while, our oldest daughter, her husband and their new baby. Then we let rooms to new faculty, especially from the English department, grad students, and younger students, too, to mothers with young children, and many friends, older and younger.

IMG_4393For four years the house was full of Servas, Warm Showers, and Airbnb visitors from all over the world. I just took down the map because the hundreds of map pins were crowding each other put and falling onto the floor.

IMG_3686Because we had the space to do it, we hosted hundreds of community dinners, house concerts, book groups, women’s circles, poetry readings and book signings, political meetings, trunk shows, workshops, cooking classes, and celebrations of all kinds.

IMG_7504.jpg Just last year, we hosted a series of neighborhood potlucks that involved knocking on on 250 doors and hand-delivering invitations.

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Letting go, then, is more than selling the house. It’s a lifestyle change. We’re looking a houses a third the size of this one!

Nonetheless, I’ll still be me and Tom will still be Tom. Monday night dinners will continue, the first Friday salon will continue. I’ll have less cleaning to do, and more time for writing. We’ll take what we really need and love with us, and pass the the rest on.

Here’s what we’ll leave behind. May it serve its next owners as well as it has served us.

(If you’re interested in buying our place, it’s listed here.)

 

Neighborhood magic: community

Eve Neuhaus 5 Comments

The city of San Luis Obispo from Monterey Heights

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.  Aldo Leopold

“The greatest lack in contemporary society is community,” someone at the SLO Soiree last Sunday said, and it struck me as true.

FileItem-57643-SteynbergGallery_fullThe setting in which the statement was made completely belied it: the guests at that gathering form a deliciously civilized community. At its heart is a group of friends who’ve been coming to soirees facilitated by Dr. David Hafemeister, physics professor and expert in nuclear policy and foreign relations, for many, many years. Now held at the Steynberg Gallery on Sundays from 7 – 9, participants enjoy wine and cheese before sitting down to a presentation of some sort and a lively Q&A session. Last Sunday a couple of retired lawyers debated whether America is in decline. They were wise and erudite and the discussion was both profound and very much fun.

0421test_ban_treaty_hafemeisterThe sense of community one finds in a group like the SLO Soiree is rare; it takes a rare human being like Dave Hafemeister to draw it together.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.   Bertrand Russell

Not so long ago, every neighborhood was a community. Small businesses served the neighborhood and kids went to the neighborhood school. A neighborhood was an ecology, a complex set of relationships, that took up the greatest part of our time, energy and attention.

Neighborhoods, small towns, villages, tribes, and families are all ecologies, for better or for worse, and more or less sufficient unto themselves. Cities are made of neighborhoods – fortunately, or they’d be cold places indeed – but all neighborhoods are not communities.

David Spangler says,

Some people think they are in community, but they are only in proximity. True community requires commitment and openness. It is a willingness to extend yourself to encounter and know the other.

Today, though there are impressive exceptions like the cohousing movement, communities built on proximity are increasingly short supply all over the world. The oil industry, all those cars and roads to drive them on, is largely responsible.

RQNIn Monterey Heights, my neighborhood, community is on the increase. Neighbors are coming together the way they do when facing a disaster – or the potential of a disaster, as many of us view the new freshmen dorms being built on our doorstep. A clear indicator of community is how long it takes to walk the dog – everyone I meet wants to talk.

Together, we imagine seven four-to-five story buildings looming over our mostly one-story neighborhood. We agree on how hard it is to cross Grand Avenue already. “Can you believe the Environmental Impact Report didn’t take the intersection of Slack and Grand into consideration?!” We visualize roving gangs of 18-year-olds looking for parties on our already student-rental-ridden blocks. A series of meetings is being held, and neighbors, armed with a common cause, are getting to know one another.

Equality comes in realizing that we are all doing different jobs for a common purpose. That is the aim behind any community. The very name community means let’s come together to recognize the unity. Come … unity. – Swami Satchidananda

As climate change, continuing economic instability, shifting values and lack of a common belief system bring more chaos into our lives, finding commonality with others around us is more and more essential.

As Ganesh Baba says,

We must shed our fear of one another, not for some medieval ideal, but as the only practical course to continue as a species.

Let’s make survival of the human race our common goal and take responsibility – individually and together – for our part in preserving the integrity, stability and beauty of the planetary community by preserving the integrity, stability and beauty of our own small part of it, the neighborhood.

Creating harmony amidst diversity is a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century. While celebrating the unique characteristics of different peoples and cultures, we have to create solidarity on the level of our common humanity, our common life. Without such solidarity, there will be no future for the human race. Diversity should not beget conflict in the world, but richness. — Daisaku Ikeda

Thanks go to IdeaArchitects and Moon Magazine for many of the quotes.

 

Neighborhood magic: Elisabeth Abrahams (Part 1)

Eve Neuhaus 5 Comments

This is a warning: if you’re a neighbor of mine and you stop by in the afternoon for a cup of tea, you may well end up interviewed here. That’s what happened to Elisabeth Abrahams, dancer and dance therapist, playwright and yoga teacher, who lives just up the hill. Born and raised in England, Elisabeth is in her 80’s now. I’ve chosen to break my conversation with her into two parts; this is the first.

We sip black tea with milk on the deck and I ask her the same questions I asked Tom.

“On a routine day in your life, what makes you happiest?”

“What makes me happiest?” Elisabeth reflects for a moment. “Oh, when it gets to be around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon, I like to sit down with a cup of tea – my latest tea taste is China Oolong tea – I don’t have milk in that – and some kind of a biscuit, a cookie.”  It is exactly 4:00 and I wish I had some cookies, biscuits, in the house, but no.

Elisabeth and Joe

photo credit: Susan Pyburn

She laughs to herself asking, “Should I say this?” before going on. “The other thing I really like to do – this is earlier in the day – the tea thing takes place at about, you know, tea time – the other thing is to draw a warm bath in the morning,”  she sighs contentedly, “and sink into it and plan the day.” She smiles. “But usually what’s happened is the telephone goes, and my husband walks in with the telephone in his hand, and I have to get out of the bath,” she laughs, “and answer the telephone.”

(Take note: avoid Elisabeth too early in the day.)

Joe is 97 and going strong. They met on a blind date in San Diego is 1978 and they’re still dancing. When I met them a few years ago they were both retired from Atascadero State Hospital where he’d been a psychiatrist and she a dance therapist.

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Elisabeth and Joe cutting the cake for his 97th birthday

I ask her, “In general, what activities give you the greatest joy?”

“Dancing,” she says right away. “Dancing of several kinds. I love to go to a ballet class, do the barre and do the moves to the music. I like to go the Madonna Inn and listen to music of the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s – and the 20’s! – and dance with Joe. I like to do a modern dance class if I can find one. That hasn’t happened for a while. And we love to dance around the house!

“I also like to read plays,” she smiles broadly, “and I should say, the best thing I’ve done in my life was to take the play I wrote to Edinburgh. I felt like a star.” Elisabeth is glowing. She takes a long sip of her tea and sets down the cup firmly. “I really enjoyed that.”

Elisabeth's play“Against the Tide  –  a portrait of a marriage” is a one-act play about Melanie Hahnemann, the Marquise Marie Melanie d’Hervilly Gohier Hahnemann, and her husband, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy.  It ran from August 26 to August 30, 2009, in the  Vault Theatre, a venue of the Edinburgh Festival.

“And I do like politics!” she says.  “If the truth be known, I like arguing.

“There’s a story from when I was working at ASH that illustrates it. They were looking for someone to be on a committee. They wanted somebody from each of the services and I’d recommended a young woman, a friend who’d come to work there recently. When she was turned down, I said I’d do it. I waited and waited to hear whether I was to go to this committee meeting but I was never called, so at last I went to my boss and asked what was happening. He shuffled his feet around and he said, ‘Um, you’d better go and ask Brenda.’

” So I go on to Brenda and she hems and haws and finally she comes out with it: ‘Well, you’re considered to be a little too argumentative.’

“And I grinned from ear to ear! She’d been sitting there, of course, so uncomfortable.

‘I am!’ I said, ‘I was brought up to be! That’s why they sent me off to study law!’ Brenda smiled and heaved a sigh of relief and said the other woman had been there long enough now and would I be satisfied if she sat on the committee. Of course I would, and that was the end of it.”

IMG_4186I ask Elisabeth, “What experiences in your life changed the way you see the world the most dramatically?”

“Well, that’s an easy one. In midlife, I went to UCLA to study Dance Therapy. I’d had a broken marriage, I was in my forties, and I was fortunate enough to meet Allegra Fuller Snyder, who is Buckminster Fuller’s daughter. I was a solid Churchillian Conservative in England, you know, didn’t believe in the National Health Scheme when it came in – I was most vocally against it. But I was ready to hear Allegra.”

The stories about that will have to wait, though. It’s time to walk the dog.

Neighborhood magic: spring in California

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. – Albert Camus

The first fall Tom and I came to California’s central coast from upstate New York, my neighbor Dana – raised in Connecticut – taught me about the seasons in California.

IMG_4176I was sitting on the ground in the front yard just after the first rain of the season, wrenching weeds from the unforgiving clay soil, missing the rich dark Eastern loam, already sated with eternal sunshine and cloudless skies. In those days, California had two obvious seasons, wet and dry—we’re hoping that’s still true.

What Dana said was much more subtle – and exciting to me – than wet and dry. She said the best way to recognize the seasons here is by noticing what’s blooming. Oh my goodness, who can resist that?

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.  – Cicero

Now, regardless of the drought—which is feeling like it really will be over tomorrow—it’s spring! My favorite season. So, I ‘ve been taking pictures of the flowers. The first two are hibiscus, a mallow native to tropical and sub-tropical regions far south of here. The flowers are maybe six inches across. Exotic, bordering on garish.

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Right now, it’s flowers are covered in bees (thank you, forces of good, thank you).

This bee is in jasmine, which burst into exuberant bloom this week, releasing penetrating waves of sweet musky fragrance. Pink buds open into luminous white flowers, half an inch across, scattered everywhere on a too-easy-to-grow vine—drought-tolerant once it’s established—that gets its curly little tendrils into everything near it, capturing whole trees if it isn’t tamed. It pulled our rain spout right off the wall (with some help from the cats, who liked to use that downspout to climb up to our balcony.) Like mock orange that graced us with its fragrance last week, the scent is worth the trouble.

 Read a wonderful LA Times article on jasmine.

 

There are people who live their whole lives on the default setting, never realizing you can customize – Robert Brault

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The delicate and graceful flowers of the Butterfly or African iris are about three inches across and grow on long elegant stems rising out of clumps of grassy leaves. They bloom almost year-around, though at times, the flowers are more abundant. One spike will produce flower after flower for weeks on end. Native to South Africa, the plant is very well-suited to our Mediterranean climate: it’s happy with lots of water or hardly any at all and grows well in sun or shade. In fact, it’s so adaptable and spreads so many of its seeds around that it’s another charming and worthwhile nuisance to add to the list.

Awe is what moves us forward. – Joseph Campbell

IMG_4180Morning glory, ipomoea purpurea, falls into the same category. The graceful flowers unfurl in the morning and follow the sun through the day, collapsing in on themselves in the afternoon. I had a gorgeous crazy-wild crop of them spilling over the fence some years ago. Purple ones and pink, too. When the fence fell and my neighbor replaced it, he pulled out the morning glory as a favor. I haven’t replanted it because there’s a reason it’s also called bindweed. It strangles its neighbors relentlessly even as the breathtakingly stunning flowers bring hummingbirds, bees, and countless smiles.

Life’s picture is constantly undergoing change. The spirit beholds a new world every moment. – Rumi

IMG_4170Pincushion Protea is another South African native that does well here provided it’s planted in a place where the soil under it can drain well. It has a strangely stiff flower and tough leaves, very exotic indeed. Each plant needs a good bit of space around it, so unlike most of the plants I’ve chosen to share here, it only shows up in well-manicured, carefully tended gardens. The weirdest thing about it is that each one of those petal-like parts is actually the pistil of a tiny separate flower.

See amazing close-up views of Pincushion protea.

Amazingly, this is just a small sample of all the flowers in bloom on the sunny central coast of California this spring.  It’s less than a third of the varieties I’ve photographed over the last week. Not one of these beauties is native to the area. As the climate continues to change, some of them will be impractical or impossible to grow here. But what joy they bring now!

From joy springs all creation, by joy it is sustained, towards joy it proceeds, and unto joy it returns. – the Upanishads